Friday, January 31, 2014

A growing minimum wage movement indicates that despite low union
membership statistics, labor's future isn't as dire as some in the
business world might hope.

Union membership remained steady last year—steady at its
near-hundred-year low. A mere 6.7 percent of private-sector workers are
union members, as are 11.3 percent of U.S. workers overall, according to
figures released last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics
(BLS.)

Those government union membership statistics, however, don’t capture
an entire swath of new, exciting and emerging labor
activists—“alt-labor” activists—whom alarmed employers would like to see
regulated by the same laws that apply to unions. Yet before we regulate
them as unions, shouldn’t we first count them as unions?

Consider those striking fast food workers you’ve been reading about,
the ones calling for a $15 an hour wage. Their numbers are not counted
in the union membership figures. How about those Wal-Mart workers who
struck for Black Friday and just won a key court case? Uncounted. What
about the day laborers who joined any one of hundreds of workers’
centers nationwide? You got it, not included. Neither are the
restaurant workers, home health care workers, taxi drivers or domestic
workers, all of whom are organizing for workplace power outside
traditional unions.

Why are these labor activists uncounted? The BLS bases its union
membership numbers on the Current Population Survey (CPS). Every month,
the government asks about 15,000 people whether they are union members
or members of an employee association like a union. The people who went
on strike at McDonald’s for a day, or who joined a local workers’
center, will almost certainly say “no” to this question, because they
don’t pay union dues or aren’t covered by a contract. The government’s
questions have no place for these workers who are part of a new breed of
“alt-labor” groups leveraging workplace power outside the realm of
collective bargaining —such as through worker centers, labor coalitions,
or the three million members of the AFL-CIO’s Working America. In
addition, the government union numbers exclude people who report they
are self-employed. In todays’ economy, that could easily mean day
laborers and domestic workers who are part of new labor groups. Continue reading at: http://prospect.org/article/why-alt-labor-groups-are-making-employers-mighty-nervous

The organization tweeted a link about Wendy Davis, and now all Thin Mints must be thrown into the sea

Remember when pastor and right-wing activist Kevin Swanson called the organization “wicked”
and pleaded with the American public to boycott Thin Mints? Well,
there’s another boycott happening, this time because a group of
anti-choice organizations think the Girl Scouts endorsed Wendy Davis in
the Texas governor’s race.

Which, you know, never happened.

As Tara Culp-Ressler at ThinkProgress
points out, the “endorsement” in question is actually a tweet from
December linking to a Huffington Post slideshow naming Davis, Malala
Yousafzai, Beyoncé, and others as the “2013 women of the year.” The Girl
Scouts’ official Twitter account then asked followers who they thought
should be included in the list of “incredible ladies.”

But the
tweet was enough to inspire John Pisciotta, an anti-choice activist in
Texas, to call for a boycott, and a number of anti-choice groups have
agreed to stop eating Caramel DeLites and TagaLongs to prove their
point.

“The Girl Scouts were once a truly amazing organization,”
Pisciotta told Breitbart. “But it has been taken over by ideologues of
the left, and regular folks just will not stand for it.”

The boycott website also warns that the organization’s curriculum for girls celebrates “pro-abortion role models” like Hillary Clinton.

As I’ve written before, the Girl Scouts have inclusive but pretty anodyne policies regarding
sexuality, gender and religion, and do not have an official position on
abortion rights or reproductive healthcare. Angry speculation about its
connection with Planned Parenthood and other issues has gotten so
intense that the organization directly addresses these questions on its website.

Fluke, who currently works as a social justice attorney in Los
Angeles, said in a statement obtained by The Huffington Post that she is
exploring a run for the seat, which lies in a safely Democratic
district.

"I’m flattered that I’m being discussed as a potential candidate,
especially for Rep. Waxman's seat, considering his incredible legacy,"
Fluke said. "A number of folks I respect very deeply have reached out
today and encouraged me to run. I am strongly considering running. I’ll
be making my decision soon."

Fluke, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention
in September of 2012, is a vocal proponent of reproductive rights.
Limbaugh's comments about her came in response to her advocacy for
contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

On her personal website,
Fluke writes that she's "devoted her career to public interest advocacy
for numerous social justice concerns, such as LGBTQ rights, worker
rights, economic justice, immigrant rights, and international human
rights, including focusing on the impact to communities of color."Hilary Rosen, a Democratic campaign consultant who works for
SKDKnickerbocker, which handles Fluke's press, tweeted Thursday that she
thinks Fluke would make a good candidate.

Saying she’d “had enough,” state Sen. Wendy Davis unloaded on Attorney General Greg Abbott on
Tuesday night, blaming him and his allies for waging a smear campaign
against her family and warning he had picked a fight with the “wrong
Texas gal.”

Abbott's campaign could not immediately be reached for comment. A day after the publication of a Dallas Morning News story
questioning some of the details her personal story, Abbott campaign
spokesman Matt Hirsch said Davis had “systematically, intentionally and
repeatedly deceived Texans for years about her background, yet she
expects voters to indulge her fanciful narrative.”

Davis' remarks on Tuesday night were
the most direct, personal and sustained criticism the Democratic
candidate for governor has leveled at her expected Republican opponent
so far.

“They know they cannot defend their public record,” Davis said of the
attorney general and his allies. “So they’re attacking my private
life.”

Davis was speaking at a boisterous, sold-out fundraiser for the
Travis County Democratic Party, serving as keynote speaker at the
Johnson-Bentsen-Richards dinner at the tony Four Seasons hotel in
downtown Austin.

Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth, rose to prominence last
summer after waging an 11-hour filibuster against a restrictive abortion
bill. A few weeks later, she announced she was running for governor.
Her celebrity helped her rake in millions and raised Democratic hopes
that the party can win statewide office after nearly two decades in the
wilderness.

But for the last 10 days, her campaign has been rocked by criticism
about the way she characterized her early biography, which stressed her
struggles as a single mother. Davis acknowledged she got a couple of
details wrong, in particular the age at which she and her first husband
divorced. It was 21, not 19, as she had previously stated.

On Tuesday night, Davis attempted to
forcefully reclaim that narrative while criticizing Abbott on a range
of policy issues and promising to change the direction of Texas, where
Republicans control every statewide office and both houses of the
Legislature.

The National Review magazine, longstanding house news organ
of the establishment right, is facing a lawsuit that could shutter the
publication permanently. According to The Week,
a suit by a climate scientist threatens to bankrupt the already
financially shaky publication and its website, the National Review
Online (NRO).

Scientist Michael Mann is suing the Review over statements
made by Canadian right-wing polemicist and occasional radio stand-in for
Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn. Steyn was writing on the topic of climate
change when he accused Mann of falsifying data and perpetuating
intellectual fraud through his research.

Mann,
Simberg said, is “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that
instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.”

Mann sued for defamation. Steyn and the Reviewvowed to fight the suit, given that defamation is notoriously difficult to prove in court.

“My advice to poor Michael is to go away and bother someone else,” said Review
editor Rich Lowry. “If he doesn’t have the good sense to do that, we
look forward to teaching him a thing or two about the law and about how
free debate works in a free country.”

Again, they misunderstand Econ 101 -- and the ride they're being taken on by the Tea Party and religious right

When it comes to explaining complex political dynamics, the
media tends to adopt simple narratives rather than sophisticated
commentary. This has been particularly evident when examining coverage
of the Republican Party’s ongoing civil war.

The battle
for the heart and soul of the GOP is more than social conservatives
parrying with establishment Republicans. It is a pantomime that has many
actors performing on a number of stages, but with only one clown:
libertarians.

Libertarians are a funny bunch. By funny I
mean ignorant not only of basic economics but also the ride they’ve
been taken on by the Christian Right and the neo-Confederates within the
Republican Party.

Nullification is the common cause
that drives this anti-establishment triumvirate. Nullification of the
federal government is now the weapon of choice for theocrats,
libertarians and white supremacists. Since 2010, state legislatures have
put forward nearly 200 bills challenging federal laws its sponsors deem
unconstitutional. Typically, laws the nullifiers believe challenge
“religious liberty,” the Affordable Care Act and gun control.

Recently,
Kansas signed into law the Second Amendment Protection Act, which
prohibits the enforcement of federal laws regulating guns manufactured
and used within the state. Missouri put forward a bill that would have
allowed for the arrest of federal agents enforcing gun laws. Similar
bills have been introduced in 37 other states.

Of
course, the ACA has been a high-priority target for the nullification
movement with more than 20 bills introduced in state legislatures to
nullify the president’s healthcare law. The Hobby Lobby, with the
backing of the right, is attempting to nullify the Affordable Care Act’s
contraceptive mandate in the Supreme Court. A favorable ruling will
mean privately owned businesses are free to discriminate against gays,
women and anyone else on the basis of religious liberty.

A
report published by Political Research Associates says, “The
nullification movement’s ideology is rooted in reverence for states’
rights and a theocratic and neo-Confederate interpretation of U.S.
history. And Ron Paul, who is often portrayed as a libertarian, is the
engine behind the movement.”

Not only was it sad to hear the news this morning of Pete Seeger’s
passing but startling to realize that it was 45 long years ago that we
first met. It was in 1969, at Georgetown University, when I was a callow
college freshman and he already was a legend among folk music lovers
and political activists.I knew his songs, had many of his records and played them all the
time, especially a concert album with the great Bernice Johnson Reagon,
founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, and the Rev. Frederick Douglass
Kirkpatrick, the Baptist minister in charge of folk culture for Dr. King
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

There was another album I loved called “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
and Other Love Songs.” It wasn’t so much the folk music revival of the
fifties and sixties that first drew me to Seeger, but that title
song. “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” told the story of a captain ordering
a platoon to cross a river despite his sergeant’s warning that the
water was too deep and treacherous.

It was an explicit metaphor for the quagmire of Vietnam and the
escalation policy of President Lyndon Johnson, each verse but the last
ending with the bitter, “The big fool said to push on.” When Seeger
first tried to sing it on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,
CBS network executives censored it from the broadcast but relented under
pressure and he returned to perform it in late February 1968;
coincidentally, less than a month after the attacks of the Tet offensive
took US forces in South Vietnam by surprise and radically changed
American public opinion about the war.

In the years after, Seeger and his music would float in and out of my
life like a warm summer breeze, that unique combination of laid back
and earnest always in his light tenor voice. I’d see him from a distance
or we’d talk backstage at concerts and rallies. That first time, at
Georgetown, was the Friday afternoon before the massive Moratorium March
on Washington on November 15, 1969. Kids from around the country had
come to DC for the anti-Vietnam protest and Georgetown had reluctantly
opened its dorms and other buildings so they’d have an indoor place to
sleep, one of several times in those years that the school would become a
de facto Day’s Inn for protesters.

One of the rooms that had been opened to we, the rabble, was a
lecture space off the main campus at the foreign service school called
the Hall of Nations — so named because the walls were lined with the
national flags of UN members. That weekend, the university removed all
the flags, apparently fearing theft, desecration or students from
Vanderbilt or Ohio State huddled under the banner of Ethiopia for
warmth. But they left the shiny metal flagpoles in place, each of which,
for some unknown reason was sharpened at the top end to a fine point.

A
ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upholds
California’s ban on conversion therapy for minors, a discredited
practice that claims to “cure” people of being gay, is another sign of
the collapse of the conversion therapy industry, according to the
Southern Poverty Law Center.The court reaffirmed its earlier
decision upholding the ban Wednesday. The ruling means that the only
recourse for the therapists challenging the law is the U.S. Supreme
Court.

“We are thrilled
that the federal appeals court has, for the second time, confirmed that
states can protect kids from the harmful practices used in so-called
‘conversion therapy,’” said David Dinielli, SPLC deputy legal director.
“Science proves that it doesn’t work. It harms kids, and it tears
families apart.”

In 2012, the SPLC filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit
on behalf of four young men who claim they were defrauded by Jews
Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), a New Jersey organization
that offers conversion therapy services.

In therapy sessions,
the men were instructed, among other things, to stand naked in a circle
with other patients and a naked counselor; to cuddle with members of the
same sex, including other patients and counselors; to violently beat
effigies of their mothers with a tennis racket; to go to gyms and
bathhouses in order to be nude with father figures; and to participate
in mock locker room and gym class scenarios where they were subjected to
ridicule as “faggots” and “homos.”

Conversion therapy has been
discredited or highly criticized by all major American medical,
psychiatric, psychological and professional counseling organizations. In
addition, the American Psychological Association has expressed concern
that conversion therapy practices “create an environment in which
prejudice and discrimination can flourish.”

“With our lawsuit
against JONAH and the collapse of Exodus International and other
conversion therapy organizations, it is clear this industry is
crumbling,” Dinielli said. “Also, states across the country are taking
steps to ban these harmful practices marketed to unsuspecting kids and
their families. Soon, conversion therapy and its practitioners will be
relegated to the dustbin of history.” California Gov. Jerry
Brown signed the state’s ban on conversion therapy for patients under
the age of 18 in 2012. Conversion therapy services have been discredited
or highly criticized by all major American medical, psychiatric,
psychological and professional counseling organizations.

Repression carried out in the name of anti-communism was made possible by the cooperation of the business community

Pete Seeger’s death has prompted several reminiscences about his 1955 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). And for good reason. Two good reasons, in fact.First,
Seeger refused to answer questions about his beliefs and
associations—up until the 1940s, he had been a member of the Communist
Party—not on the basis of the Fifth Amendment, which protects men and
women from self-incrimination, but on the basis of the First Amendment’s
protection of freedom of speech.

While invoking the Fifth was not
without its perils—most important, it could put someone on the
blacklist; individuals who invoked it frequently found themselves
without work—it had the advantage of keeping one out of jail. But the
cost of the 5th was clear: though you could refuse to testify about
yourself, you could not refuse to testify about others.

So Seeger
invoked the First Amendment instead. A far riskier legal position—the
Court had already held, in the case of the Hollywood Ten, that the First
Amendment did not protect men and women who refused to testify before
HUAC—it was the more principled stance. As Seeger explained later, “The Fifth means they can’t ask me,
the First means they can’t ask anybody.” And he paid for it. Cited for
contempt of Congress, he was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to a
year in prison. Eventually the sentence got overturned.

Second,
not only did Seeger refuse to answer questions about his associations
and beliefs, but he also did it with great panache. When asked by HUAC
to name names, he refused—and then almost immediately offered to sing
songs instead. Much to the consternation of the Committee chair, Francis
Walters, Seeger followed up with a more personal offer.

I know many beautiful songs from your home county, Carbon, and
Monroe, and I hitchhiked through there and stayed in the homes of
miners.

Parenthetically, I should note that Seeger’s hearings were
not the only such circus of absurdity. If you want to treat yourself
to an afternoon of giggles, check outAyn Rand’s testimony, where she insisted that no one in Russia ever smiled. Or this wondrous exchange between Zero Mostel and two members of HUAC.

A Republican lawmaker admitted yesterday
that his party is having difficulty moving forward with immigration
reform due to deeply rooted racist animus expressed by a portion of
their own constituent base.

In an interview with Buzzfeed,
the Southern congressman, who wished to remain anonymous, explained
that members of his party felt handcuffed and unable to pass a
comprehensive immigration reform package due to fear of push back from
hometown constituents.

“Part of it, I think — and I hate to say this, because these are my
people — but I hate to say it, but it’s racial,” admitted the lawmaker.
“If you go to town halls people say things like, ‘These people have
different cultural customs than we do.’ And that’s code for race.”

Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) added , “There will always be people [who have]
different reasons for opposing the change. We have a history in this
country of demagoguery when it comes [to immigration]. You know, ‘Irish
Need Not Apply.’ There’s nothing new going on today that’s gone on
before. This isn’t the first time that there’s been some ugliness around
the issue of immigration.”

Despite widespread bipartisan support
for immigration reform that would include a pathway to citizenship for
undocumented children and immigrants who are already in the United
States, progress has been glacial due in no small part to high profile
members of the Republican party including Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who
often uses incendiary rhetoric to bolster his national ambitions.

The House of Representatives passed a bundle of abortion restrictions
Tuesday that would dramatically reduce the number of health insurance
plans that cover the procedure. The vote was 227 to 188, with one
lawmaker voting present

The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act
(H.R. 7), sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), would prohibit
insurance plans sold in the new health care exchanges from covering
abortion, and it would eliminate tax benefits for small businesses that
purchase insurance plans covering abortion. The bill would also prevent
the District of Columbia from using its own locally raised funds to
subsidize abortion care for low-income women.

Currently, more than 80 percent of private health insurance plans
include abortion coverage, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a
reproductive health research group.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said after the vote, "This President
promised that ‘under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund
abortions.’ We know now that was a lie, and this bill corrects his
broken promise. We should not be taxing Americans and forcing them to
fund a violation of their religious freedom. The passage of this bill
today is one more step toward restoring respect for the sanctity of
human life.”

In fact, the bill would not actually prevent federal taxpayer dollars
from funding abortion because the Hyde Amendment has already done that
for more than three decades.

Earlier this month, Democratic women lawmakers protested the bill
in the hallway outside its House Judiciary Committee hearing. They
pointed out that it would raise health care costs for women, drive
insurance companies to drop a previously noncontroversial medical
benefit and financially penalize small businesses. They also took issue
with the fact that an all-male group of Republicans was pushing the bill
through the legislative process with very little input from women.

“H.R. 7 is a reflection of a majority that is out of touch with the
American people and struggling to understand fundamental truths about
reproductive health -- and we really mean struggle,” Rep. Louise
Slaughter (D-N.Y.) said on the floor of the House. “This extreme
legislation was originally sponsored by a man, originated from a
subcommittee composed of 13 men, and was passed out of the Judiciary
Committee with the votes of 21 Republican men. This has been the problem
for a long time -- men in blue suits and red ties determining what
women can and should do when it comes to their own health.”

Davis is a Democrat running for governor of Texas. Opponents are trying to smear her life story, and the media isn't helping

Here we go again: sexist tropes being used against a high-profile female political candidate. A recent article in the Dallas Morning News by the paper's senior political writer Wayne Slater purported to correct the biography of Wendy Davis, the democratic candidate for Texas governor. Davis made headlines last summer for her pink-tennis-shoe wearing filibuster against
a severely restrictive anti-abortion bill. In his piece, Slater charged
that he was telling a fuller version of Davis' life story because "some
facts have been blurred" in the version she and her campaign have been
telling.

Davis has portrayed herself as a tough single mother who
made it through Harvard Law School and went from living in a trailer
park to working her way up to a Texas state senate seat. Since Slater's
article was published last weekend, conservative media has jumped on it
as evidence that Davis is not the (American) dream candidate.

Most of the attacks against Davis are sexist. As a columnist for Breibart.com tweeted:
"Wendy Davis: My story of attending Harvard Law on my husband's dime
while he took care of the kids is a story every woman can relate to." Talking Points Memo has a plethora of examples of the full-force sexist attacks. And Twitter exploded earlier this week with the #MoreFakeThanWendyDavis hashtag, making fun of Davis for being a liar.

The
problem is that the Dallas Morning News article that caused this
backlash is questionable at best, and is undeniably sexist in its
telling of Davis' story. Slater implies that Davis was a negligent
mother in order to pursue her education and political career, and that
she used her husband for his money. He quotes an "anonymous source" that
claims that "Wendy [Davis] is tremendously ambitious. She's not going
to let family or raising children or anything else to get in her way."

The
"blurred facts", according to Slater, were that Davis says she divorced
at 19, when in fact she had only separated from his first husband at
19, with the divorce being finalized when she was 21. Slater says that
Davis overstates her time living as a single mother in a trailer,
explaining that "she lived only a few months in a family mobile home
while separated from her husband before moving into an apartment".

Davis' bio on her website
states that she paid for her tuition at Texas Christian University and
Harvard Law School through "academic scholarships, student loans, and
state and federal grants," Slater's piece says that Jeff Davis, Wendy's
second husband, "paid for her final two years at TCU". He also says that
after Davis was accepted to Harvard, "Jeff Davis cashed in his 401k
account and eventually took out a loan to pay for her final year there."
(Jeff Davis has given a statement to CNN clarifying all the reasons behind his decision to cash out his 401k).

The nation’s largest LGBT advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign,
is endorsing state Sen. Wendy Davis in her gubernatorial bid, the organization announced Wednesday.

“Wendy Davis has been a champion for equality for all, whether it is
the working poor or LGBT Texans,” HRC President Chad Griffin said. “Her
dedication to the underdog and commitment to fairness for all Texas
families make her the right choice for Governor.”

Last year’s session was just as impressive with her co-authoring the
Senate version of a statewide workplace nondiscrimination bill and
co-authoring inclusive insurance nondiscrimination legislation. And when
a different version of the anti-trans marriage bill came up, she was
one of only two senators to vote against it.

HRC endorsed Davis because of her “stellar record on LGBT equality”
and ” history of putting Texas’ families first,” compared to anti-gay
Greg Abbott, her likely opponent in November.

“Wendy Davis’ energy and courage are needed in Austin,” said Julie
Johnson, a Texas attorney and HRC board member emeritus. “I’m proud to
be one of the tens of thousands of HRC members in Texas, and I know that
Wendy will fight for all our families when elected. Wendy has proven
herself an effective leader — and that’s exactly what the people of
Texas need.”

But, surprisingly, she wasn’t connected to any of the three pieces of legislation dealing with marriage equality last year, HJR 77, HJR 78 and HB 1300. Davis has never made a public statement in support of marriage equality, and when asked by Dallas Voice during a press conference about how she would approach it as governor, she replied that she would leave it in the Legislature’s hands.

Wendy Davis is just the beginning -- women who band together with other women threaten the status quo

Erick Erickson is back in the news announcing how proud he is of the moniker “Abortion Barbie,” which he slapped on Wendy Davis earlier this year. As Jessica Luther eloquently explained, this is the ultimate example of “bad mother” narratives, tacked onto “lying bitch” and “gold-digger”
stereotypes. Davis is, however, a particularly unpalatable package to
her foes. It’s not only that sexist media outlets are fixated on her
mothering in ways that fathering is
not an issue for her male peers. No, what’s really challenging about
Davis is that she is a public single woman with friends.What conservatives would like everyone to forget as quickly as possible is moments like this: during Davis’ famous filibuster, state Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, surrounded by orange t-shirt clad supporters, asked, ”At
what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be
recognized over her male colleagues?” It was a rare public display of
gender-based solidarity. How incredibly pushy. And dangerous to the
status quo, which is dedicated to policies that undermine efforts of women to act together and challenge systems intent on depriving them of their autonomy.

It’s not true that conservatives don’t like single women. They love single women and, of course, mothers – if they are vulnerable, dependent, and ashamed, and if they know
their place in the “natural” order. If they are, in other words,
isolated and dependent. The role of female friendship is even more
important when you consider that single women, single mothers in
particular, are often surrounded by other women who support them. What
conservatives cannot confront head on is that Davis is a single mother
and visibly not isolated by that fact. And she’s a public figure. Now,
to make matters even worse, it is clear that she’s produced daughters
who are like her. Last night, Dru and Amber Davis publicly wrote letters refuting claims made in the most recent spate of “bad mother” attacks on their mother. Is there no end to the Davis women’s shamelessness?

Our
brains are bombarded from birth by images and stories of male
fraternity and solidarity. Whether it’s school hallways plastered with
photos of past presidents, legions of elves and dwarves making their way through Middle Earth, every major animated film made by Pixar, or sports teams that represent their cities, most of our images of collective effort and fellow-feeling are male.

From
the time our children can listen to stories, watch movies or pick up a
tablet or turn on a radio we ply them with stories that suppress
representations of women as friends, as united, and as supportive of one
another’s efforts or as heroic. There are some exceptions, of course,
but there is no getting around the avalanche of facts attesting to the marginalization of images of female friendship. A few representative examples:

The
House speaker drew a hard line on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
in a first-time meeting with the LGBT Equality Caucus.

BY Daniel ReynoldsJanuary 30 2014

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act has no likelihood of passing this year, says John Boehner.

The
House speaker told the LGBT Equality Caucus that there was “no way”
ENDA would pass, during his first-ever meeting with the group of
lawmakers last week.

Rep. Mark Takano, a gay congressman and cochair of the caucus, related the exchange Tuesday to the Washington Blade after President Obama’s State of the Union address.

“A
number of us did meet with, actually the caucus met with Speaker
Boehner,” Takano said. “He said no way was it going to get done in this
session.”

However,
Takano classified the conference between the Republican speaker and the
caucus, a group of over 100 lawmakers seeking LGBT equality, as “a
historic sort of meeting.”

Boehner’s
remarks reveal that he will most likely not schedule ENDA, which would
provide antidiscrimination protections for LGBT workers nationwide, for a
vote on the House floor in 2014. Last April the act had easily passed
in the Senate with a vote of 64-32. But in November Boehner had voiced
his belief that ENDA was “unnecessary.”

“I
am opposed to discrimination of any kind in the workplace or anyplace
else, but I think this legislation … is unnecessary and would provide a
basis for frivolous lawsuits,” he said in a press conference that month. “People are already protected in the workplace.”

Many
LGBT activists and organizations have expressed disappointment that
Obama had not announced direct action in his Tuesday address. The
president has the power to issue an executive order that would offere
the protections of ENDA to federal contractors, a group comprising
roughly 20 of the American workforce. He had promised to make such an
executive order during his 2008 presidential campaign.

From Wikipedia:Bloody Sunday (Irish: Domhnach na Fola)[1][2]—sometimes called the Bogside Massacre[3]—was an incident on 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, in which 26 civil-rights protesters and bystanders were shot by soldiers of the British Army.
Thirteen males, seven of whom were teenagers, died immediately or soon
after, while the death of another man four-and-a-half months later was
attributed to the injuries he received on that day. Two protesters were
also injured when they were run down by army vehicles.[4] Five of those wounded were shot in the back.[5] The incident occurred during a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march; the soldiers involved were members of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (1 Para).[6]

Two investigations have been held by the British government. The Widgery Tribunal,
held in the immediate aftermath of the event, largely cleared the
soldiers and British authorities of blame—Widgery described the
soldiers' shooting as "bordering on the reckless"—but was widely
criticised as a "whitewash".[7][8][9] The Saville Inquiry, chaired by Lord Saville of Newdigate,
was established in 1998 to reinvestigate the events. Following a
12-year inquiry, Saville's report was made public on 15 June 2010, and
contained findings of fault that could re-open the controversy, and
potentially lead to criminal investigations for some soldiers involved
in the killings.[10]
The report found that all of those shot were unarmed, and that the
killings were both "unjustified and unjustifiable." On the publication
of the Saville report the British prime minister, David Cameron, made a formal apology on behalf of the United Kingdom.[11]

The Provisional Irish Republican Army's (IRA) campaign against the partition of Ireland
had begun in the two years prior to Bloody Sunday, but public
perceptions of the day boosted the status of, and recruitment into, the
organisation enormously.[12] Bloody Sunday remains among the most significant events in the Troubles
of Northern Ireland, chiefly because those who died were shot by the
British army rather than paramilitaries, in full view of the public and
the press.[3]

The frozen opalescent lake and thin, gray sky fade together into
white light where the horizon should be. Tall, skeletal grasses shiver
on the beach in a wind that makes any sliver of exposed skin burn.

The
Arni J. Richter, an icebreaking ferry, is about to pull away from
Northport Pier for its second and final trip of the day to Washington
Island. It’s loaded with food and fuel for the more than 700 hardy
residents who call the remote island, just north of Door County
peninsula in Wisconsin, home.People have lived on Washington Island for over 160 years. They’re
proud of their tight-knit community and their Icelandic heritage. But
life on the island is threatened. For the past 15 years, islanders have
watched Lake Michigan slowly disappear. Last January, the lake hit a
record low, 29 inches below the long-term average as measured since
1918. The Richter Ferry was just inches away from grounding in some
spots along its increasingly treacherous six-mile route to the island. The Great Lakes, which contain one-fifth of the world’s above-ground
fresh water supply, are sometimes referred to as America’s “northern
coast.” As communities along the rest of the nation’s shorelines brace
for rising waters brought by climate change, however, and spend billions
on replacing sand swept out to sea in storms, the communities of the
Great Lakes find themselves with more and more sand and less and less
water.

“The island depends on the ferry for everything,” said Hoyt Purinton, President and Captain of the Washington Island Ferry Line
and great grandson of the ferry’s first captain. “If the ferry can’t
get to the island, the island won’t survive. Even if you could find
another way to get food and fuel over there, if there’s no easy way for
tourists to make the trip, the fragile island economy dies and the
community and culture goes with it.”

As the lake retreats, some people blame the Army Corps of Engineers
for dredging projects that widen channels leading out of Lake Michigan.
Others wonder if the watershed can no longer support the 40 million
people in the U.S. and Canada who now rely on the lakes for their
drinking water.

Obama’s calculating speech offered little of substance for most Americans

Barack Obama put on a deft performance Tuesday night. With trills of
empathy, the president’s voice soared to hit the high notes. He easily
carried a tune of economic populism. But after five years of Obama in
the White House, Americans should know by now that he was lip-syncing
the words.

The latest State of the Union speech offered a faint echo of a call
for the bold public investment that would be necessary to reduce
economic inequity in the United States. The rhetoric went out to a
country that in recent years has grown even more accustomed to
yesterday’s floor becoming today’s ceiling.

The speech offered nothing that could plausibly reverse the trend of
widening income gaps. Despite Obama’s major drumroll about his executive
order to increase the minimum wage for some federal contract employees,
few workers would be affected. The thumping was loud, but the action
was small.

Obama of course blames congressional Republicans for obstructing
needed reforms — and they certainly deserve blame. But for Americans
struggling to make ends meet, the record of the Obama administration is
littered with wreckage from its refusal to fight for people of modest
means.During 2009 and 2010 — when Democrats controlled not only the White
House and Senate but also the House — Obama skipped past vital options
for working and want-to-be-working Americans. For instance, he never
really pushed for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have helped
unions regain footing and halt their downward slide of membership,
especially after crackdowns in state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan
and elsewhere.

In a huge blow to the largest unionized workforce in the country —
U.S. Postal Service employees — the Obama administration did nothing to
undo the extreme pension-prefunding rules that were imposed during the
last two years of the George W. Bush administration. And now the Obama
White House is presiding over waves of privatization of USPS assets and
services, with grave consequences for its workers and the public.

In his speech, while Obama presented himself as an ally of federal
workers, he neglected to mention something quite relevant: At the end of
2010, he signed a bill that prohibited pay increases for most of the
federal government’s civilian employees. The pay freeze had come at his
initiative.

Industry plays up the image of the food snob to keep us divided,
but the stereotype hides a much more diverse and savvy movement, says
best-selling author and food activist Michael Pollan.

Take a stroll through most grocery stores, and many of the products
claim to be organically grown or locally sourced. The foodie movement
has swept America in the last decade, thanks in no small part to the
work of journalists and intellectuals who have championed the cause
online, in print and on the airwaves.

Michael Pollan is inarguably one of the most influential of these figures. Pollan is most famous for his books, especially In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008) and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006). He also contributes regularly to publications such as the New York Times Magazine, where his work has received numerous awards, and is a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

As organic, locally grown food has emerged as a cultural and economic
counterforce to industrialized agriculture, critics have claimed it is
elitist and accessible only to those with the resources to pay more for
their nourishment. Pollan and his allies have responded, in part, by
drawing the public's attention to the low-wage workers who work in the
field, behind the counter, and in the kitchen. In recent years Pollan
has supported the
efforts of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization
dedicated to improving working conditions and wages for tomato pickers'
in Florida; in December 2013 he sided with fast food strikers and their
demand for a $15 dollar per hour wage. In an email missive for
MoveOn.org (received by 8 million subscribers), Pollan wrote:
"If we are ever to . . . produce food sustainably and justly and sell
it at an honest price, we will first have to pay people a living wage so
that they can afford to buy it." In his words, fair wages must be part
of the push to democratize food.

I recently connected with Pollan to discuss equitable food pricing,
farm worker rights, and industrial agriculture's role in casting the
food movement as elitist. (What follows is a condensed and edited
version of our conversation.) I began by asking Pollan about his
evolving personal interest in the plight of food workers.

"I've been really paying more attention to it over time than I did at
the beginning," he said. "When I wrote my first book about the food
system, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I didn't talk in detail about labor. It was much more from the point of view of the eater than the person behind the counter.

Is the anti-choice movement giving up the pretense that it has no
interest in policing women’s sexuality and only opposes abortion rights
because of fetal life? While the rote use of the word “life” as a code
word to describe a series of anti-woman and anti-sex beliefs is probably
going nowhere, there does seem to be a bit more willingness among
anti-choicers lately to admit that what really offends them is that
women are having sex without their permission.

The researchers—a term that needs to be used somewhat loosely, due to
the extensive statistical distortion employed in this paper—were
incredibly intent on portraying abortion as a product of sexually loose
women on the prowl. They mostly succeed in portraying themselves as
remarkably prudish and out of step with mainstream realities. “Almost 90
percent of reported abortions are procured by women who have had three
or more (male) sexual partners,” the researchers write, clearly
expecting the audience to reel in terror at the idea that a woman might
not marry the first boy she kisses. Which means that most women having
abortions are … average. Women generally report having had
about four male sexual partners, but social scientists are inclined to
think the number is probably higher than that, because men report having
a much higher average number of partners, and that discrepancy is
mathematically impossible. Indeed, one study showed that by telling women that they’re hooked up to a lie detector,
the number of sex partners they will cop to goes up. Slut-shaming, such
as the kind produced by this report, causes women to round down.

“The fraction of women reporting abortions is far larger among women
with multiple sexual partners than among monogamous women,” the study
authors write. It’s a classic example of how this paper, which is
supposed to be a study, is actually full of misrepresentations and
dishonest number-massaging. After all, “monogamous” and “has had
multiple partners” are not mutually exclusive groups. No doubt the study
authors mean “has only had one partner ever” as their definition of
monogamous, a strange and sloppy definition that would mean that a woman
who lost her virginity during a one-night stand yesterday is more
“monogamous” that a woman whose second marriage has lasted 30 years.

“Eighty-three percent of women who report having an abortion have
cohabited at some time,” they write, clearly expecting the audience to
find cohabitation to be a shockingly risqué behavior. Again, this makes
women who have abortions average. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
“[M]ost young couples live together first before entering marriage.” By
the time they turn 30, three-quarters of women have cohabitated.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson